Donald Trump has been on another P.R. tear this week, following a certain gaffe involving Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook. During a White House event, Trump mistakenly referred to Cook as “Tim Apple”—a simple slip of the tongue, the type of mistake all of us make sometimes. Of course, rather than admitting to that, the president has fabricated multiple stories to explain the mistake away—claims including that he actually said “Tim Cook Apple,” and that he deliberately omitted “Cook” in order to save time. But as Stephen Colbert put it during Monday’s Late Show, “Mr. President, words don’t just disappear from the middle of sentences. Unless it’s CBS bleeping me when I say, ‘Excuses like this are fucking insane.’”

On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump had tried to save face by telling Republican donors that he’d actually quickly said “Tim Cook Apple,” but that his soft “Cook” got lost in the audio—a thing that totally happens. “Even Trump’s own donors, who had to donate at least six figures to get into this event where he told this lie, knew the story was nuts,” Colbert said. “One of these donors told reporters, ‘I just thought, why would you lie about that. . . . It doesn’t even matter!’”

“Yes,” Colbert added, mocking a rich donor’s voice. “I was there at the donor event and I turned to my wife and I said, ‘This man will lie about literally anything; hand me my chequebook. Trump 2020!’”

And as for Trump’s second story? On Monday, the president tweeted, “At a recent round table meeting of business executives, & long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words. The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!”

“You know, on their deathbed, I think everyone says the same thing,” Colbert quipped. “I have only one regret—that I wasted so much of my life on saying last names instead of occupations. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, little Johnny Paper Route!”

On Late Night,Seth Meyers agreed that this whole ordeal has to be “one of the dumbest things Trump has ever lied about.”

“A normal person would have just let it go, written it off as a slip of the tongue, and moved on,” Meyers said. “But Donald Trump is not a normal person.”

And Meyers has some issues of his own with Trump’s shifting excuses. For one thing, the comedian noted, “Tim Cook Apple” doesn’t actually make more sense than “Tim Apple.” As Meyers put it, “Tim Cook Apple sounds like how Tarzan would describe someone making a pie.” If you’re going to lie, Meyers suggested, at least make sure the lie improves everyone’s perception of the situation. Trump’s maneuver, Meyers said, was basically the equivalent of telling a cop, “‘Officer, I have not been drinking, because I was doing too much cocaine!’”

At the end of the day, “Trump lies for the same reason Forrest Gump runs: he just does,” Meyers said. “Only Trump could claim that he was trying to save time and words by writing a long tweet that takes up time and words. You know, if you really want to save time and words, you could just not talk at all; do all your campaign rallies with duct tape over your mouth.”